Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Ideology Page 3 of 4

The Argument for Capitalism

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On April 3, 2019

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It is often worth stating an ideology’s argument in pure form. Let’s do that for capitalism, not because we necessarily agree, but because understanding why people believe in an ideology is important.

If someone buys something, it is because they want or need it. Giving people what they want or need is a good thing. Capitalism produces the most utility of any system because it makes limited judgments about what people want or need and because every time someone does buy something that gives whoever provided it more money. The more people who buy something, the more resources those who provide those things have.

This simple message is: “Do more of this.” If, on the other hand, not enough people want something at a high enough price, a simple signal is sent: “Do less (or none) of this.”

Thus, capitalism has a feedback system which makes sure that society produces more of what people want or need the most, and less of what they don’t want or need.

Capitalism makes no judgments about what people want or need except, “Will they pay enough?” (Other systems, like government, will make some judgments, capitalism does not.)

Capitalism thus requires nothing of people but that they act in their own self interest: Buying what they want or need and selling whatever they have to sell for the most they can get.

This means resources, including people, will be used in whatever people are willing to pay the most money for, and thus will be allocated to what people want and need most.

Thus, capitalism, compared to other systems, creates the most good, and (if done right) avoids coercion and the need for a lot of central authorities making decisions.

Of course this argument is wrong. Anyone with sense can pick it apart.

But, to paraphrase Churchill on Democracy, capitalism’s boosters say “Capitalism is the worst system, except for all those others which have been tried.”

Capitalism isn’t perfect, it doesn’t work close to the “ideal type” described above, but, what else is there?

That’s the argument for capitalism in a nutshell. It’s a powerful argument, and while its flaws are evident, it can’t be dismissed out of hand because due to the problem of alternatives. So far, the best alternatives appear to have been mixed economies, with markets in charge of part of the economy, and government and non-profits in charge of the rest. But those economy forms appear to break down in time, as the post world-War II liberal (not neoliberal) economy did.

Today, we look to the Scandinavian model of social democracy, but even there we can see some problems beginning (in particular in Sweden, as best I can tell), and, after all, a large part of the economy is capitalist and enmeshed in a global capitalist network.

So, is there genuinely an alternative? Boosters say no, and it’s a real problem. That doesn’t mean there is no alternative (Thatcher’s famous phrase) but that too few people–especially powerful people–accept that there is. Indeed, our debates are mostly about forms of capitalism, and under how much and what type of control markets should be, not about capitalism itself.

An ideology which can make it look like it is the only way to do things is a powerful ideology.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Circles of Identity, Circles of Violence

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On March 18, 2019

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Globe on FireThe worst humanitarian disaster in the world today is almost certainly Yemen, which is under siege and bombed every day. There is a famine, people are dying every day, and there is no let-up in sight.

For years, there were terror attacks in Iraq virtually every day; bombs going off in markets, and so on. Then someone would, say, attack the London Underground and the West would go into paroxysms of grief.

We care about violence in direct proportion to how much we identify with the victims. We identify with fellow Westerners far more than we do with non-Westerners. Let there be an attack in Western Europe (not Eastern Europe) or an English-speaking nation and we cry and talk about racism and fascism and intolerance and go on and on and on.

And meanwhile Yemenis die. Iraqis die. Afghans die.

One might say “all deaths matter” but we don’t act that way. Some deaths definitely matter more than others, some violence definitely matters more than other violence. When Saudi Arabia, aided by the United States, bombs the hell out of Yemen, well, that doesn’t much matter.

When some right-wing fascist shoots up a mosque, we go into paroxysms for days.

All lives, and all deaths, are not equal, they never have been.

Which is, I guess, like saying, “The sun is hot.” Everyone knows this, we just, too often, pretend otherwise. We pretend we care about people who aren’t like us, who aren’t members of our societies or societies we identify with.

And maybe we do. A little bit. A very, little bit.

Identification is in the running for the first evil; the first sin.

Oh, it’s entirely understandable: humans are tribal. For much of history, the most dangerous animal to a human was another human, and we compete for the same resources. Our near-competitor is other humans (with insects coming a close second, ever since the agricultural revolution).

It is human to identify: We put ourselves first (my body!), our families second, our friends third, our tribe fourth, and everyone else a distance thousandth.

But much of what is human is evil or self-destructive. Much of what is human is especially evil or self-destructive when it scales to billions of people.

In a world where humans are a few million or even a few hundred million people, what we do doesn’t much matter. Oh we can and did cause ecological collapses. We can and did cause genocides. We can and did wipe out entire species (including, basically, all megafauna). We’ve always been cannibalistic locusts on two legs.

But when there are billions of us, when we live in each others pockets, and when what happens in the Amazon, the Congo, or the Arctic bounces back to effect us almost immediately, when what happens when a country like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Yemen becomes a failed state, or when a country like Saudi Arabia becomes a fantastically rich, fundamentalist state exporting its particular ideology all over the world, well, our identities are ramped up into weapons far more deadly– more so than they were when our ancestors wiped out the European aborigines, or most of the Native Americans.

Identity tells us not just who to care about, it tells us who to kill.

And we are very good at killing.

The irony is that identities are very close to arbitrary. You didn’t choose where you were born, or who your parents are, so you didn’t choose your culture or your nationality. As for religion, most people worship the religion of their parents.

We kill each other fighting over characteristics we didn’t create (you didn’t create Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism, or, America, or Russia) and which almost none of us chose.

This is bug-fuck insane. If you change your religion, you are still you. If you change your nationality, you are still you. We are killing ourselves or identities which are, well, crazy to identify with. (This will strike most people as radical, but no, your religion or nationality is not fundamental and if you think it is, you are nuts.)

Or we divide ourselves up over frankly absurd biological characteristics: the color of our skin, or our sexual characteristics.

None of this makes any sense.

And the consequences are severe: Because we do not take care of everyone, because we are scared of each other, we treat each other badly.

The simplest and surest rule of human nature is this: People who are abused tend to become abusers. People who are treated well tend to treat other people well. Oh, this isn’t a 100 percent rule–there are always exceptions, those people who were abused and turn into saints, those who are treated well and are still bad…but overall it’s a rule that works.

Evil redounds. It doesn’t always, or even often, redound directly on those who do evil (the world would be a better and simpler place if it did), but it does hit other people.

Evil leads to more evil.

Good leads to more good.

But because someone has a different culture, or religion, or nationality, or skin color, or genitals, we think it’s ok to do them more evil, and less good. We think it’s ok to care more about the evil done to people we identify with, and care less about people we identify less with.

And in a world with billions of people, that doesn’t work. The evil we do thousands of miles away comes back to us.

Further, our identification with humans above all other life is also a problem.

If we cared about what was happening to other species, to other animals, we could have avoided the worst of climate change and environmental collapse. Because, we, humans are not yet taking it in the neck, we don’t much care; we have done, effectively, nothing.

But there is already an apocalypse among animals, with species dying every day, in the fast mass extinction in Earth’s history.

This was a warning sign.

But they’re only animals, we don’t identify with them, so, well, whatever.

In a world with billions of people, we will only have a good world, a world worth living in, and maybe even a world we even can live in, if we either identify with no one or everyone. Either we recognize that humans, and life, are a web supporting each all of us, and that our good lives require all of us, or we will create hell.

Or rather, given that climate change and ecological collapse are now irreversible to some extent, we have already created hell, it just hasn’t been completely delivered by nature yet.

Preferential identity, for us as a species, is an evil. Most religions and nationalities and ideologies, putting some people above everyone else, are evil. Perhaps they have done some good in the past. Perhaps they do some good in present. But overall they lead to evil, and cannot but lead to evil. (As most recently, nationalism did.)

No one wants to believe this, but most people identify with nationalities or religions or cultures or skin color or whatever. They identify with crap that either clearly is not them, or which is meaningless (who cares how much melanin you have?)

Until we fix this, every fix for our problems as a species will be temporary: a band-aid on a gusher.

So it has ever been.

Does it have to ever be?

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Liberals and the Left Fail to Notice – and Celebrate – the Intellectual Death of Conservatism

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On March 6, 2019

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This Post Is By TONY WIKRENT

Faced with Trump’s populist seizure of the Republican Party, establishment conservatives and libertarians are trying to redefine classic republicanism (referring to the ideas on which the USA was established as a republic, not to the Republican Party) to exclude anything other than market capitalism.

The Winter 2019 issue of conservative quarterly National Affairs carries an article, “Republicanism for Republicans,” which marks the intellectual grave of American conservatism. It was written by Brink Lindsey, former director of regulatory studies at the radical libertarian Cato Institute and fromer senior editor of Regulation magazine. Lindsey is now drawing his thirty pieces of silver as vice president and director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. [1]

Lindsey begins by summoning together the bedraggled and disconsolate disciples of “pure” conservatism and libertarianism. Looking over the smoking ruins and salted earth of their conservative paradise laid waste by Trump and his hordes of “ethno-nationalism”, Lindsey laments that “What was once your political home, or at least a familiar haunt you visited regularly, has been overrun by people or ideas you find repellent.”

We cannot simply wait for Trump to pass from the scene, or for Democrats to win big, and hope that things will then somehow go back to normal. We must face the fact that the Trump presidency is not a freak accident, but rather the culmination of developments that have been corrupting the conservative movement and the Republican Party for many years. To root out this corruption, to build a new center-right that can lift this country up to its noblest aspirations instead of dragging it down to its darkest impulses, we must return to our intellectual foundations and build anew from there.

This is a clear admission that the seven decade rise and ascendancy of modern American conservatism has met its ignoble demise at the hands of a grifting conman and TV huckster. It’s over, there is no life left in it, it has flat-lined: the relentless and richly funded climb of conservatism to national power that began with Strom Thurmond’s states rights Dixiecrats in 1948, the Austrian School economic shit-fest of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek excreted from the rancid rectum of the Hapsburg empire in 1944 and 1945, and tail-gunner Joe’s 1950 discovery of Communist Party membership cards in every desk drawer of the State Department, is finally over.

In a just universe, the fellow travelers of Barry Goldwater, Milton Friedman, William Buckley, David and Charles Koch, Jesse Helms, Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove would pop out of mortal existence and re-emerge in Dante’s infernal eighth circle, suffering each healed wound to be ripped anew. But in this world, justice is only bent toward, so we must suffer for some time the continued brain-dead lurching and staggering of conservatism: an ideological zombie still dangerous in its capacity to inflict harm and consume the flesh of the living.

A large part of the problem is that most leftists have never really bothered to understand the ideological thinking of their enemies, preferring to saute themselves in the purity of their own ideological beliefs. So, I was not too surprised that most liberals and leftists failed to notice the intellectual death of their arch-foe.

And, they have forgotten what republicanism is long ago. Actually, they probably never learned. Rather than master the ideas of statecraft developed by the antique city states of Greece and Italy, the Hanseatic League of the southern Baltic, and England in the time of Cromwell, liberals have busied themselves severing ties with the working class, collecting the contributions and currying the favor of the one percent, or at least the professional class. Meanwhile, leftists willingly descended into a mass act of historical amnesia by dismissing the creation of the United States — supposed to be a republic, but who knows or cares what that means? — as just another act of oppression committed by privileged white men.

Scrambling to control the coming discourse

So we have Brink Lindsey putting forth a project, to dress the zombie in new duds, and keep it staggering on into — who knows when or where?  “To build a new, post-Trump right, we need a new political language in which to express ourselves,” Lindsey writes. Well, of course, because after Newt Ginrich and Frank Luntz finished savaging the English language, every word and utterance of conservatives for years now have been nothing but half-truths at best, outright lies at worst.  “Right to work” has been redefined to mean “surrender to the boss man” and “No child left behind” turns out to mean “no child capable of thinking for him- or her self.”  Say “reduce fossil fuel dependence” and conservatives hear “war on coal.” A federal mandate that everyone purchase health insurance — just like state mandates that every driver have auto insurance — is vilified as “death panels.” Feed the poor, house the homeless, care for the sick, and conservatives don’t see dedication to the injunctions of a great world religion, they see socialism and looming despotism. How can any political language survive such a consistent and persistent record of misuse for diabolical dissembling and massive misinformation? Of course Lindsey feels the need for “a new political language.”

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Why the “If You Don’t Work, You Don’t Eat” Is a Hell Ethic

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On April 27, 2018

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Once upon a time, most of humanity lived in a condition of scarcity.

There was a lot of work to do, and unless you were disabled, you could do it.

When a farm needs work done, it needs to be done. In hunter-gatherer societies, one can usually step away from the campfire and look for food.

There is work to be done, and you can do it.

It is not fair, reasonable, or adaptive, for someone who can work, in such societies, to not work.

This has been true for virtually all of human history, but it stopped being true some time during the industrial revolution.

We gained the ability to make more stuff than we needed AND we gained the ability to do more damage than whatever we made.

Well, strictly speaking we’ve always been able to do more damage than the work was worth, but the industrial revolution increased that potential by some orders of magnitude.

Right now, probably about a third of all the work done in the world is harmful. We would be better off if it wasn’t done–most of the carbon extraction industry, most of the airline industry…practically all of what amounts to deciding who owns what, is harmful, because it involves people using carbon to go places and do things that really don’t need to be done.

Our lives include vast amounts of environmental and human pollution. This extends far beyond where it’s obvious, and it’s obvious everywhere.

For example, there appear to be no studies which don’t show a correlation between time spent on social media and lowered happiness and mood, and yet social media is one of the flagship industries of our era.

We work like dogs at jobs that either don’t need to be done, or are harmful, and thus can’t care for our children, so we hire strangers to care for our children. We fly on jets we hate, after going through airport security that is dehumanizing, dumping huge amounts of carbon into the air.

And we build items, like the old lightbulbs, which could last almost forever, with death switches so we can sell even more of them.

And yeah, we’re destroying the biosphere, choking it with plastic, and causing runaway climate change. We know we’re doing it, and we keep doing it.

So, jobs. There’s a lot of talk about a job guarantee. And that might be great, if those jobs would be ones that added to human welfare beyond giving some people some money, but under current governments and corporations, they won’t. What we need to do is give people the food, housing, and other resources they need, and giving them a job is a roundabout way to do it.

While a guaranteed income has its own issues, at least it doesn’t create jobs that probably aren’t necessary. We already have excess capacity–more food than we can eat, more manufacturing than we use. We don’t need more. We need less, and less in ways that feel like the same: items that aren’t engineered to fail, food that isn’t unhealthy for us, jobs that involve less work, and more time with our families and friends.

One of the great problems with culture is that ethics that were once mostly adaptive, like “work or don’t eat” linger on even after they become maladaptive. (Another example is “have lots of children.”)

But we’re emotionally attached to them: We take our self worth and self-image from them, and thus we cling to them even as they harm us both individually and as a civilization.

Time to stop. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough jobs–or even that we don’t work hard enough. The problem is that we distribute resources primarily through jobs, when too many jobs add little or negative welfare to the world (for instance virtually every job in finance, sadly).

People don’t need jobs. They need the resources jobs allow them to buy.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Social Facts Rule Your Life

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On October 5, 2017

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The world is human. Most humans live in cities, artificial environments created by us. We walk on streets laid out by humans, work and sleep and cook in buildings, drive in cars or take buses, trains and planes. We talk on cell phones and use the internet. Even those who live in the country live on land which has been altered by agriculture and the pasturing of animals domesticated by humans. The farmer grows wheat which was bred over millenia (or genetically altered recently). The farmer raises animals humans have been raising for thousands of years. We eat the meat of cows and pigs and chicken, we dine on rice or wheat or vegetables we have tended for millenia and which we have bred to suit us.

As individuals, we did not create almost any part of this physical world. We did not invent the techniques for caring for domesticated animals, growing vegetables, or making smart phones.

We live in a physical world created by humans, many of whom are dead. Human life is human in a way that animal life is not animal. Animals have an effect on the environment, but it is minor compared to what humans have done to the world.

And this is just the physical side of the world. Just as important is the world of ideas, of social facts.

Look at the words you are reading right now. You didn’t invent writing, typing, any of these words, or language itself. You spend your life thinking most of your thoughts in a language or languages created by humans, for humans, and mostly by dead humans.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

You almost certainly receive your daily food in exchange for something called money which is probably either plastic woven to look like paper or electronic bits. Money has no intrinsic value, a million dollars in the middle of Antarctica would do nothing for you, most money isn’t even paper any more; you couldn’t even burn it for heat. Yet most of us spend most of our waking days working for someone who gives us “money” and exchange it for most everything else we want.

In times of war and famine, money may lose most of its value. Food, cigarettes, or sex may be worth more. Money’s value is a social fact.

When someone is killed by another human being, whether it was murder or not is a social fact. In war, if a soldier kills someone it is probably not murder. If the state is executing someone it is not murder. When police kill someone it is usually not considered murder. Social facts.

The quality and amount of health care provided to individuals is a social fact. It depends on where they live. In some countries, it depends on how much money they have. In other countries, it depends on how much power they have.

The amount of melanin in someone’s skin is a physical fact. That having a “black” name in America leads to half the interview requests for an identical resume compared to someone with a “white” name is a social fact(x).

Cannabis is almost certainly less physically harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but selling or possessing cannabis is far more likely to get you thrown in jail. In the US, during alcohol prohibition, this was not true. Alcohol is alcohol, its legal status is a social fact.

Social facts rule most of your life. They are layered on top of physical facts and tell you how to understand those facts, and how to act towards them. There are few more consequential decisions than “When should I kill someone?” or “When should someone receive health care and how good should it be? or “Should I hire someone and for how much?”

Not all ideas are social facts. You may believe something “ought” to be true, but often other people do not agree. You think your girlfriend shouldn’t cheat, she doesn’t agree, the state doesn’t care. But if you act on that idea, and so do other people, it’s a social fact. They may call her a cheater, ostracize her, and so on. If no one acts on it, it is not a social fact.

A gang or mafia may believe that their members shouldn’t inform, and they may enforce this as best they can, but obviously the state does not. It is still a social fact if they can make it one, however.

You may also believe in ideas which are contrary to the ideas currently enforced by the state or other people. Perhaps you do not believe in intellectual property. Perhaps you think confessions obtained by torture shouldn’t be used in criminal proceedings. Perhaps you believe that women should or shouldn’t be able to have abortions.

These ideas may fall short of being social facts if no one acts on them. They are just ideas about how the world “ought” to be.

But while social facts are not just ideas, they are still ideas. Unlike the rules of the material universe, they can be changed.

And because they rule our lives, and our societies are built upon them, to change social facts is to change everything.

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The Role of Character and Ideology in Prosperity

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On October 2, 2017

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(First of two collections of important articles published 2014 or earlier. Read the second.)

I want to take readers through some of my previous writing on ideology and character, and how they help form the societies in which we live. Taking the time to read these articles (a short book’s worth), should vastly improve your understanding of the world and the articles to come. It should be worth your time, even if you read the articles when they were previously published, as, at the time, they lacked both context and commentary, and were not collated to be read together so that the connections were obvious.

(I have a lot of new readers, so I’m going to kick this back to the top. These are some of the most important articles I have written–Ian)

Baseline Predictions for the Next 60 Years

While not an article about ideology, the above is an article about where our current ideology and character are going to take us: To the brink of disaster and possibly beyond, while continuing to impoverish and disempower larger and larger segments of the human race. This might be a slightly optimistic piece; there’s some reason to believe our actions in the world’s oceans could destroy the oxygen cycle, and if this is so, events will be much, much worse.

What Is an Ideology and Why Do We Need a New One?

Too many people think ideologies are some airy-fairy nonsense, while they themselves are “pragmatic” men and women operating on common sense and facts. Such people are amongst the greatest of all fools: Our entire society is based on interlocking ideologies; the primary of which are neoliberalism, capitalism, human rights, and socialism. It is not obvious, nor was it obvious to most societies that have ever existed, for example, that food should be distributed based on money, nor that ideas could be property. How we organize things, our particular ideas about markets and their role, and our ideas about who should lead us, are ideological. If we want to change society, we need to be able to control markets so they aren’t producing a world that makes us sick, unhappy, and, in increasing numbers, dead.

How to Create a Viable Ideology

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

We may look at current trends and realize that if we don’t reverse them–and reverse them fast–billions will suffer or die; but creating an ideology which can reverse these trends requires us to understand what makes an ideology viable and powerful. An ideology which does not create believers willing to die, and to kill, on its behalf, will lose to those that do. An ideology which cannot prevent people from selling out, from betraying, will definitely lose in the current world, where there is so much money available at the top to simply buy out (for billions) those who create something new, so that anything new can be neutralized into nothing but a monetization scheme.

Our Theory of Human Nature Predicts Our Policies

The ideas of an ideology determine how our society is run, and, of those ideas, none is more important than what we make of human nature.

A Theory of Human Nature Suited to Prosperity and Freedom

If we are trying to create a prosperous, free world, our policies must be based in a theory of human nature that is both true (enough) and which leads to policies that create widespread affluence and human freedom.

Character Is Destiny

Ideology and character are intertwined. Character determines what we do, what we don’t do, and how we do it. The character of large numbers of people determines the destinies of nations and of the world itself. If we want to make the world better (or worse), we must change our own characters. Those who fail to understand how character is created (and changed) will never change the world–except accidentally.

How Everyday Life Creates Our Character

Along with, as noted, our destiny. I always laugh at radicals who want more schooling, because schooling is where people learn to sit down, shut up, give the approved answers, and do what they’re told. Working life, as an adult, continues this process of learned powerlessness and acquiescence, and even in our consumptive and political lives we continue the trend; choosing from the choices offered, rather than producing what we actually need for ourselves.

How Everyday Life Creates Sociopathic Corporate Leaders

Those who lead our corporations control most of our lives, even more so than the government, because they set the terms by which we live, die, and can afford the good things in life. Our daily lives are prescribed by these people, from how we work to what we eat, to what we entertain ourselves with. We need, therefore, to understand the character traits for which our leaders are chosen, and how the process of choosing works. If we can’t learn to create and choose better leaders, we will never have a better world.

The Difference Between Ethics and Morals

If we want an ideology that tells us how to create both a better world and the people with the character to create that world, we must understand what sort of people they should be. To accomplish this, we must first understand how they treat other people–the people they know, and more importantly, the people they don’t.

The Fundamental Feedback Loop for a Better World

The shortest article on this list, this is also one of the most important and speaks directly to how money directs behaviour and how that directs our choice in leaders.

Living in a Rich Society

It’s been so long since parts of the West were truly prosperous that people have forgotten what it’s like, and they’ve forgotten that it creates a different type of person than a scarcity society.

Late 19th and Early 20th Century Intellectual Roots

Lived experience creates character and character feeds into ideology. It’s worth looking at how various themes of the Victorian era were created by those who lived through that time and the time that came before it.

What Confucius Teaches Those Who Want a Better World

Amongst those who have created powerful ideologies, Confucius is in the first rank; Confucianism has been the most important ideology of the most populous and advanced region of the world for most of the last two thousand years–or more. Confucius was very aware of what he was trying to do, had a theory of human nature, and a theory of character. We would be fools not to learn from him.

Concluding Remarks

I hope that those who are interested in creating a better world will read the articles linked above. What I’ve written amounts to a short book, and the ideas are interrelated. If you have read a few of my posts, or even read all of them, but not thought of or read them with each other in mind, you cannot have the full picture of how these ideas work together, and why the different parts are necessary.

Ideas are often destroyed in practice by those who do not understand the reasons for the various pieces of the puzzle and prescriptions. These people feel they can pick and choose without that understanding. Character and ideology and ethics and every day life are all intertwined; you cannot pick one and say,”This is supreme.” They create each other.

Of course, the above is not a complete intellectual package. Large chunks are missing. My next piece will be a review of some key economic articles, specifically concerning why the world is as it is today: Why we lost post-war liberalism, why we have austerity and neoliberalism and so-called free trade. That piece comes after this one because without understanding our own characters, the characters of our leaders, and how ideology works, we cannot understand our current circumstances.

I will then be moving on to new articles that focus on technology, geography, the environment, and their effect on societies though the ages, with an emphasis on those technologies and environments which create prosperity, freedom, and egalitarian cultures and explore why they do so. There is an important trend today, an argument, about changing our technology to improve society, but it will only work if we understand how technology changes society.

Originally published Oct 2, 2014.  Republished July 28, 2015, March 6, 2016 & October 2, 2017.

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Book Review: Confucius and the Chinese Way, by H. G. Creel

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On August 8, 2017

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Statue of Confucius from Rizal Park in ManilaAmong ideologies and religions, one of the longest lasting and most influential was Confucianism. Confucianism was the most important ideology of the Chinese for about two thousand years, and China was either the first or second most advanced region of the world for most of that time (India being the other contender.)

The review is of an older book, published in 1949, before Confucian influence was so heavily hit by the rise of Communism.

Confucianism, by that time, was seen as an essentially reactionary philosophy: Everyone should know their place and stay in it, worship their ancestors, obey their parents, and so on, but Creel argues, convincingly, I believe, that Confucianism was a radical project at the start.

Confucius lived in a period of warring states. Huge armies were raised, battles were frequent, taxation and levies were harsh, and maiming and torture were common. Ordinary people were much afflicted, as noble families fought it out to see who would unify China.

Confucius believed that the welfare of the common people should be the goal of ruling, and he set out to do something about it. That something was to create a philosophy, and a teaching, which produced officers for the lords, officers who had been trained to believe the common weal was the goal of rulership.

Confucius astutely noticed that there was no formalized training for officials and created it. He wasn’t the only one to so notice: The legalists and the Mohists did as well, but in the end, it was his system that worked.

Confucius decided to build off human nature as he observed it: He noted that parents tend to love their children and care for them, and that children love their parents. He tried to take that love and transfer it to officials and rulers. Rulers were to treat those below them as beloved children, and those below were to obey their rulers as parents.

Confucius wasn’t a fool, of course. He understand that this could be abused, so he noted that if a ruler didn’t act like a loving parent, with beneficience to those he ruled, then he wasn’t actually a ruler, but a tyrant, and duty was to oppose him.

A ruler should pick the best officials, and leave the governing to them, with an eye to flourishing of all.

Confucians should act out of benevolence no matter the circumstances, or even the results. Confucius recognized that one could try to do good, and though “Heaven” could frustrate one, the merit lay in trying. Thus, a man who tried could feel secure that he had done his duty, whether he succeeded, or even was ever appointed at all. Willingness and ability to serve was enough.

Interestingly, Confucianism was most successful in two periods: before the unification of China and for something over a hundred years afterwards. The Confucians were quite popular with the people, and princes wanted their support. When the first Emperor of China won, he did it primarily through Legalist doctrines (individuals exist only to serve the state, and the Emperor is the absolute ruler), but his dynasty was soon overthrown with the aid of Confucians, and the first few Emperors were good Confucians, until an ambitious and smart one came along who decided to gain control over the Confucians.

How he did so is a lesson which should resonate though history: He formalized teaching of Confucianism with appointed masters and teachers with stipends and so on. He chose them, he controlled their finances. Confucianism seemed to benefit from this, but, of course, it put Confucians and Confucianism largely under Imperial control. From that point on, Confucianism (very generally speaking, we’re talking about two millenia of history) was never again so beneficial for the people, and much more of a prop for the ruling class.

The Confucian sages and scholars had been, to use the modern word, co-opted.

A few summers ago, I read a large number of books on Confucianism, and for my purposes this was the best, because what interested me most was the life cycle of the ideology: How it rose, how it gained power, and how it fell.

Confucius, famously, died thinking he was a failure (as Jesus may have, and many other reformers). Only after his death did his teachings become influential, and the day they truly took power, it seems to me, is when the days of their full benefit became numbered.

This is normal for ideologies, and Confucianism got a far, far longer run, than most at being beneficial.

Seeing this cycle play out millennia ago is a nice antidote to studying more recent rises and falls; such as the relating to the end of New Deal liberalism with Reagan/Thatcher, or the end of the world system put in place after Napoleon.

It is also, in some ways, a master class in the details of ideology creation: Confucius created a system which had innate rewards for those individuals who followed it, which was beneficial to the governments which adopted it, and which was able to create a large group of people who wanted it to continue, while ensuring a wide support base in the population.

All of this makes for fascinating reading, and I recommend this book highly, though it’s old and may be hard to find a copy.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Ideology Precedes Policy Which Determines Outcomes

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On March 23, 2017

Comments

Ok, so…

The results are rather worse than that, actually, and anyone who reads this blog regularly is aware that, for example, working class white male wages peaked in 1968, in real terms. It’s not as if every other demographic has gotten off, either. Slowly the scourge has worked its way thru the demographic and socioeconomic classes, till practically everyone but the top 5% or so is being hit to some extent or another, even if they haven’t lost lifespan—yet.

Marcy Wheeler asks:

Which got me wondering: to the extent this is driven by a failure in ideology — by the failure of the American dream — which comes first, the failed ideology or the rising mortality rates?

…

. But as we try to figure it out, we ought to be focusing at least as much on how to roll out life and meaning that can sustain Americans again as we are on blaming Putin for our recent failures to do that.

Ideology tells tells you how the world works, what to do, how to do it and why you’re doing it. For example, NeoLiberal ideology has an axiom that “jobs are created by those who have money.”  On the face of it, this seems obvious: nobody without the ability to pay you has ever given you a job, I’d bet.

The corollary of this is “the more money that rich people have, the more jobs there will be”. So, under Neoliberal ideology, you funnel money to the rich and corporations and they create jobs.

Doesn’t actually work, mind you, but that’s what the ideology says.

The ideology also says “money is earned by people because they fill the needs indicated by the market, which represent what people and society want.”

Which means “if you have a lot of money, you deserve to have it because you got it filling other people’s needs”.  It also then follows that people with a lot of money are the sort of people who are good at providing what other people want, so therefore they should have more money so they can provide even more.

Poor people, by this ideology, do not deserve to have much money, because if they were doing something that other people wanted a lot of they’d have a lot of money.

Etc, etc…

Ideology tells people what policies to pursue. Those policies then create results.  With different ideologies, you get very different results.  FDR’s New Deal and the Keynesian consensus after WWII had as its thesis “the more money ordinary people have, the more they will buy, creating demand for products, which will create more jobs.” It also had “money in the hands of rich people doesn’t create demand and does create political problems which damage markets, therefore we should keep them from having too much money.”

The result of those propositions was the best economy in American (and European history), with growth rates higher in the middle and lower classes than in the upper and the rich classes (rich is not upper class, it is beyond.)

Ideology Determines Policy.

Policy Determines Outcomes.

(One might ask “what determines ideology”. Part of the answer will be in the upcoming “Creation of Inequality booklet” I’m about three-quarters finished.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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